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I've been using Mac for Perl dev for about 6-7 years (whenever OS X 10.1 came out) and consider it first class. The Mac:: packages are largely irrelevant -- Carbon is a legacy API from the 90s, about as relevant today as a Win95-specific API would be I suppose. If you used a Win95:: library, you'd get similar complaints from users of a modern Windows OS.

The "flood" of Win32:: packages is because you need those platform-specific hacks to get anything done on Windows Perl. N

File::HomeDir, for the Mac, requires Mac::Files which is unfortunately bundled with Mac::Carbon. The latter does not and will never run on a 64-bit Perl, but that's the direction we're going. Because Bundle::CPAN requires File::HomeDir, a fresh Perl installation on a Mac is very painful if you have a 64-bit Perl. I had to manually install File::HomeDir after locally patching it to work around the Mac::Files pain.

This argument has become so tiresome, though. Are there any examples of any real installation where the natural constant values of "user homedir from getpw*" followed by, say, Documents, are wrong?

I can accept that to be 100% accurate to the spec, you must ask the Cocoa layer, but since there is no way to change these values, it's fairly absurd to demand that we will simply make it harder to use a Mac than another unix box. It would be nice to have a Cocoa-based directory checker, but without it, nothing

And even if you believe that making the system call is the right thing to do, and it is too hard to be done easily in the short term, isn't going with the ~/Documents norm a much better default choice than leaving basic CPAN and a host of other modules hosed?